A huge percentage of your marketing expenses reach people who will never buy your merchandise or services. While you may be able to ignore that fact, if your profit margins are high enough, you’ll do better if you know how to avoid spending marketing dollars sending your message to people who are not interested or have rejected your products.

We read a lot in the trade press about how to identify prospective buyers. Maybe we should spend some time thinking about identifying known non-buyers.

If you can eliminate non-buyers from your target audience, the ROI on your marketing expenditures will automatically improve.

These are the nine component systems, which should be in place, to execute a successful direct-to-customer retail commerce strategy. The order is significant in only one point — marketing should be last. But I’ve found this sequence is generally correct

product master

order management system

single view of inventory

warehouse management system

product delivery

content management system

customer service

web store

marketing

In addition, this applies to e-commerce, brick-and-mortar, mobile, catalog — this is the infrastructure you need.

It’s not so much based upon any decisive research … but rather just a lot of common sense. I think one of the burdens carried by the new generation of marketers, is the ease of using short cuts to the execution of marketing programs, and often the associated low cost of most digital-based messaging.

This short cut has allowed many marketers to be less discriminating about what works with whom and boasting about remarkable ROI’s because of the low cost.

Armondo Roggio posted this late last month. Of course, it’s not just about ecommerce, it’s really about anytime you’re shipping product to a buyer.

Here are his five things:

put coupons in the box

put free merchandise in the box

put a treat in the box

put a review request in the box

put a catalog in the box

Of course, I can make the case that for specific companies this list should change. But Armondo makes the underlying point that the box you ship to your customers is very important.

For example … the treat or free merchandise may do more for your customer loyalty than a frequent buyer program

And the follow up question for Armondo is this: how to you make sure your customer sees all of this material? Do you put it on top of the purchased merchandise to make sure they see it? Or, do you put it underneath … because the first thing they should see is what they bought?

It’s critical to first, define terms. By Direct Commerce, I’m referring to electronic & mail order retail sales, as reported by the US Dept of Commerce.

There are several similar reports out today, but they define their reporting term differently. For example, comScore issued a quarterly report on non-travel ecommerce sales, excluding auctions, etc. They reported about $50 billion of sales in 2013Q1.

The chart below includes all Retail Sales, compared to Direct Commerce sales, as defined above. The 2013Q1 sales for Direct Commerce is $94.422 billion, year-over-year growth of 17%. Direct Commerce now represents 7.52% of total retail sales

As you can see from the narrowing of the gap, Direct Commerce sales is growing almost twice as fast as retail sales, overall. Retail sales in 2013Q1 grew only 1%, while Direct Commerce sales grew 4.2% in the same quarter (quarter-over-quarter).

Digital Marketing … especially, email and social media … is leading to marketing the easy way.

Marketers are just buying keywords, or blasting emails to everyone on every promotion, disregarding whether any part of the target market is already a customer.

I’ve bought vitamins from the same company for over ten years. They send them every 60 days. Once or twice a year, I start seeing Ads by Google for this company, everywhere I go. Why?

Lazy marketing.

There are two broad categories of lists: compiled lists and response lists. In the digital world, we haven’t figured out how to “purge” our existing customers from email campaigns or PPC campaigns, because we perceive that the cost to purge them exceeds the cost of including them.

But, we’re ignoring the cost of irritating our customer base. Denny Hatch, writes in Target Marketing, this month about getting a promotion from Amazon for two books he’s already bought from them. How long before Denny just marks Amazon promotional emails as “Spam” and never looks at them?

There is a sense in which the Golden Rule applies to marketing as well. Your customers are likely annoyed by the same things you’re annoyed by … pay attention out there!

This is an interesting develop … the continuing integration of social media into the marketing mix, especially, the marketing automation mix. This is especially worth reviewing, if your target demographic is on the younger side … < 30.